Hi. Hey. Hello.
I haven't written something for Head Snakes in a long time. At first, it was because things were so busy. Fifteen hours a week, every week, facing all of my worst fears every Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday. Then it was because I felt good. I felt good for the first time in so, so long, and — suspicious me — I didn't want to hex that by writing sad things down. And then it got really, insanely hard. It felt like I'd started digging into myself in January and by the middle of February I'd reached the molten core: the hottest, most hidden fears in me. I believe that most of us go to therapy willing to admit certain unflattering things. Those things might make us seem vulnerable to others for whom those fears are most unflattering. But for us, they're not the real shit. Then you reach a point in therapy where you have to decide if you're willing to say the shit beneath the shit — the thing that, for whatever reason, is the most repugnant to you. I got to that place in February and it was so revealing and terrifying and difficult that I could not imagine getting on here and telling you all about it. I remember reading a Hiroshima survivor's account of the atomic bomb once. They said the light felt like God taking their picture. I am not comparing my experience here to being atomically bombed — rest assured. But that light. That quality of light. I do relate to that. I felt like I have sat in the searing sun of myself for the last month or more, and I cannot tell you how I survived it.
But now I'm back, and I'm trying to write something, and I can't catch you up the way I'd like to. I can't give you a chronological or even logical account of myself the last few months. I have to write from the hip, from right now. I have decided to write these transmissions in the middle of Brain School, to write, as they advise me to do here, quick-and-reckless, without polishing my diamonds. Right now I'm sitting on a chair in a large room full of other clients. Everyone is practicing different exposures, different things they're terrified of. One man is moving from person to person, asking people to explain their thoughts on free will. In another corner, a man is playing Slap Jack with two other women — I have no idea why. A woman just walked to the front of the room and asked for our attention, then started to sing Let It Go from Frozen. Another person is standing at the white board, deliberately failing a spelling test. I want to go to a private room and be alone, write a good essay. But I'm forcing myself to write right here.
I have been feeling so much despair lately. I have been feeling like I'm relapsing and like this whole brain school thing, promising as it was, has been a failure. Or, more accurately, that I had failed it. For the second half of February and the first half of March I felt like I felt back in New York in December. Anxiety would seize me awake, it would play me like its puppet all day. And once I was awake — well. Intrusive thought after intrusive thought, the content of which could only have been created by the poet laureate of the self-loathingest circle of hell. After a two-month absence, my old body was back, and with it, its oldest feeling: abject, abstract, utter, all-around terror.
I felt like I had relapsed. After months of feeling alive and good and interested, of flirting with the world, I felt nothing about anything except when I felt terrible about everything. I didn't feel any movement, I didn't feel any anticipation. I wasn't looking forward to anything, and it didn't feel like I'd ever look forward to anything ever again. That's the trick of anxiety and depression. They feel like they'll last forever. They feel true, in the inviolate sense of that word. They feel like facts. For weeks I had come to brain school fired up. I was what my therapist calls Acceptable Ash — the kind of Ash I allow myself to be, the kind of Ash that gets love and deserves respect. I was sparkly, feisty, funny. I wore wild makeup and took little OCD lambs under my care. I said smart shit and was generally regarded as a smart alec. I felt like I was doing it. I really felt like I was doing it. And then it all toppled. That first day of hell I came to school in a gray sweatsuit. When I entered the room I sat in the corner, nearly under the chair, as desperate to be invisible as a hurting animal. In group therapy, instead of cheering others on and saying Wise Mind Shit, I told the class what it felt like: I was possessed by a demon. I always had been. The demon, I believed, had haunted my family for generations. It had its scent all over us, its hideous musk.
This terror — this demon — has defined my entire depression career. It is so fused with me I think of it as myself. Recently, I went to a Reiki master in a strip mall in the exurbs, the kind of place where buildings are designed to look like George Washington's summer home, all columns and red brick. Next door, a Target always hovers. The woman started moving her hands above my body. I started to feel something. Kindness. I felt her kindness. Warmth. I started to feel a connection. And then everything went black. The terror came in hot, it took over the connection feeling and stuffed it out. Oh, said the Reiki woman, moving her hands. Later, she told me she'd never worked with someone so blocked before. All seven of your chakras, she said, all of them blocked. I imagine, she said, looking at me and into me, that this would feel like never being safe in your body, not even one minute a day. I nodded and cried. She was right. My entire life I have been holding my breath, staying just above the deep waters I thought would drown me. Flailing. I cannot be in my body, but I must, and so I stay at the top, in my head, and try to un-think what is happening below.
*
Today I went to therapy with my original OCD therapist who left Brain School to start her own practice. We sat on couches and I wept. I am back at the beginning, I said. I will never feel better. She asked me if we could do parts work — something I've done a million times before. She told me to close my eyes. She told me to imagine the terror. She asked me to ask my body to show me the first time I'd felt this terror.
I felt exasperated in advance. I already knew what my body would show me. I've done parts work for years now, and it always shows me the same fucking one. There I am, six years old, in my childhood bedroom. My sister is sleeping next to me. I check her mouth to make sure she is breathing, and then I engage in my regular nightly terror ritual. My brain starts to whir: I am alive I am alive I am alive. Then it whirs again: I will die I will die I will die. Then the counterpoint: Maybe you won't die, though. Maybe you will live forever with God, or forever with Satan. Maybe eternity is what's real.
I panic. I don't want to die. I don't want to die and be dead. And so I switch. Okay, then I will live forever. But no. No no no. My brain, an animal in its cage, pacing, circling, pawing to get out. That is just another version of the terror: everyone I have ever known eventually receding, getting farther and farther away as I keep on living and living and living. The loss! The boredom. The forgetting of everyone.
All night I go back and forth on this shit, gnawing the problem to the bone. But the bone cannot be digested. I will either die or live forever, I realize. It is too late to do anything about it. I am trapped in a universe not of my choosing, and there are only two equally odious ways out.
I am told this is textbook existential OCD. I am told it is part of a quest for certainty. I am told we can solve it.
But sitting on my therapist's couch today, I started to freak out. I've talked about this all before! I cry. I've done years of therapy on this problem: this stupid, stupid chestnut. I am practically shouting now. And now you're going to make adult me go talk to the six-year-old and comfort her but she doesn't trust me, I say. And why would she? We DO die! She IS fucked! I'm not an adult, I sob. I never have been. I have no idea how to take care of her.
Go to her anyway, said my therapist. Ask her a new question.
So I did. And suddenly there we were, standing in the inner dark of my body, facing each other. I tried to think of a new question. The one that came to my mouth was a surprise. What are you really afraid of? I said. What are you really scared about?
The terror, the six-year-old said. The terror. No, I said, I don't think so.
And then the part began to weep.
*
Last week, my therapist at Brain School and I talked about suicide for a long time. It's a feeling I felt I was never supposed to feel and so it's a feeling I try not to admit I feel but my therapist wants me to talk about it more so it will lose its power. He wants me to talk about wanting to die until it bores me.
He was asking me to describe wanting to die and I was telling him about the death-eternity-death-eternity dilemma. He was drawing it all on the board with a dry erase marker, mapping out my wanting to die, and then he looked at me quizzically and said, I must admit I'm confused, and I said about what, and he said, about you wanting to die. I believe you, he assured me, and I'm not trying to go all brightside. But well, for a suicidal person you just seem so… so…
He was searching for the word and I had it. Lifey. I said. I'm lifey. He laughed. Lifey! He said. That's exactly what you are. You say you don't want to be here, but you come in every day with such beautiful stories of wanting to be here: so many hikes in the mountains so many nights dancing with friends so much wildness so much kindness so much humor. I wonder, he said, as if inside my head — I wonder if your problem is not that you want to die but that you want to live. I wonder if it's not that you hate life but that you love it too much, and so your greatest terror is the idea of it ending. I wonder if this terrible sadness, he said: I wonder if it isn't joy?
My mind slides backward.
The story I've been telling, my polished story, is that, as a kid, I wanted to die. I wanted to die and I kept it a secret to spare the people I loved. My happiness, in this story, was a ruse. A decoy.
But if I actually remember — if I think past the story — it's more complicated than that. As a little kid, I wasn't only suicidal. More accurately, I was gutted by the world. Just gutted. In spring we had lilies of the valley in our yard, and I would sit for many minutes at a time and hold them in my hand, rejoicing in their flutes. My grandma loved lilies of the valley, and smelled like them, and I loved my grandma and so I loved these little flowers, creamy white in the grass. Lilies of the valley, I'd say out loud, the words perfect on my tongue.
In winter, on our way to school, my friend MJ and I would stop halfway to make chairs in the snow at the base of a neighbor's tree. On the way home, we'd sit in the chairs for an hour or more, the cold on our asses, eating snow. And what did I feel, then? Happiness. I think it was happiness.
At home, my mom received fat stacks of catalogs every day in the mail. They were just catalogs: Sears and LL Bean and Victoria's Secret. But I raced to the mailbox all the same each day. I spread them out in a fan, put my hands on their colors. I'd bring them to the bathroom with me and sit near the heating vent for hours, a blanket over me, flipping through them. To this day, I can say sentences like, the woman in the boucle sailor neck shirt and the culottes, the terminology hard-earned all those years ago.
I remember one particular day when I was returning a library book to the library around the corner. It was a Judy Blume book about a girl named Sally J. Friedman and I had loved it with all of myself, loved Sally as myself. Reading it, I felt a familiar dilemma: with every page I turned, I got more Sally. But every page I turned also meant I was closer to the end of the book, closer to a point where there would be no more Sally to know. After that, I would only be able to remember Sally, and the memory would get further and further away. As I dropped the book in the return slot, fat little tears came out my eyes. Sally was gone, I thought. Sally was gone.
This is emo as hell and I know it, but I have to say it because this was the kind of kid I was. Yes, I was a six-year-old who sat up at night drilling myself into the ground over death and eternity. But it wasn't because I hated being alive. It was because I loved it here. It was because life was like that Judy Blume book: every day you lived you got more life, but you also got closer to the end. Every day you lived in that tension: that gutting, gut-wrenching battle between life and death. Every time you consented to love something, you consented to losing it — to let love turn into memory, connection into loss. That was the deal, and I hated the deal — not because I wanted to die but because living was so poignant and potent and real that I sometimes didn't know if I could bear letting it go.
I meant to write about death, Virgina Woolf once wrote, only life came crashing in as usual.
*
Let us go back to my other therapist's office, back into my body, back into that inner dark where the six-year-old is staring at me and I am staring at her and she is telling me she is afraid of life, afraid of the terror of it, and I am surprising myself by pushing her, by saying, that's not it, is that actually it until she begins to weep. And now is where it gets psychedelic, now is the moment the six-year-old unlatches her chest as if it were a cupboard and reaches her hands inside. When the hand reemerges, it is holding a heart. The heart is black and tarred. It looks like a cinder. Around the heart a snake wraps itself tightly. I look at the snake and know immediately this is the demon: the terror that wakes me every morning, the telescoping emptiness, the belief that there is no meaning in anything and no point to life.
The six-year-old is staring at me, heart held out, and suddenly I know this is a riddle, suddenly I know what to ask. Is this your real heart, I say, and she smiles. Shakes her head. She puts the black heart in her hands, warms it up. And suddenly the black melts and is gone. The snake evaporates with a high and angry hiss.
The six-year-old opens her hands. Inside them is another heart. This heart is golden, the consistency of room temperature honey. This heart is glowing and melting and reforming and glowing some more. This heart breaks and comes back together, breaks and comes back together. Is this your real heart? I ask, and the six-year-old nods. She is crying again, because the real heart is what she's afraid of.
*
I talked to a friend last night about existential crises. Isn't it funny, we agreed, that the existential crisis we think we'll have is rarely the one we have.
My whole life, I thought I understood what kind of pain I was in, what crisis I was up against. Life was terrifying. Life was meaningless. Life was painful, and I didn't want to be here. But lately I have come to realize that that pain — real as it is, terrible as it is — is not the real pain. My fear is not death, but life. My fear is not that it is not enough, but that it is too much. My fear is that loving means losing, that I will not be able to bear the loss.
And so I've shut down. Don't get me wrong, I've stayed pretty lifey. But I have also disconnected. I'm afraid to read books because I'm afraid to be moved. I'm afraid of music because I'm afraid of remembering. I'm afraid of having a hobby because I'm afraid of pleasure. In his book about depression, The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon describes his depression similarly — as a fear of connection and remembering. In his house, he says, there are old pictures he can't bear to look at and old books he can't bear to re-read. The world is entombed around him as an unbearable nostalgia: the realization that time might move in only one direction, that whatever we do and whomever we love will recede from us indefinitely. The fear that remembering the real thing without the real thing with us will destroy us.
The perceived crisis is not actually the crisis. The world is not ugly, after all, but too beautiful. And so for years I've struck a deal: I'll be here, but I'll keep one foot out. But I can't do that anymore. It's taking me away from life. It requires its daily dose of smaller deaths.
If the crisis is not the crisis, maybe the task I thought was the task is not the task. Maybe, as Pema Chodron says, facing our demons is not reliving some traumatic event or discovering we're worthless. Maybe it is abiding with the uneasy, disquieting sensation of nowhere-to-run and finding that we don't die; we don't collapse. Sometimes, what we find is freedom.
Maybe my task is not to vanquish the demon, or to get rid of the depression. Maybe my task is to feel it all. Perhaps now my task is to remember. Perhaps we all have the same task: to live, which is another way of saying: to let the world break our hearts.
This isn't any easier than the first task, by the way. If anything, it's more terrifying. The cure for OCD is a version of Pema Chodron's advice: you must sit with the thing you are most afraid of and learn that it will not kill you. And you must do it again and again and again.
*
After I came out of the inner darkness and back to the world of Ellie Mental Health, my therapist gave me an exposure assignment. I had to go home and mourn my divorce. Not be angry at it. Not tell a story about it. Mourn it. I was commanded to listen to songs I used to sing with my ex-wife, and then, when I was good and teary, to write an obituary for our relationship. To grieve it and let it pass. To let it die and show myself I could survive its afterlife.
I came home and lit a candle. I opened my computer and began to write. Memory after memory arose, moment after moment. My brain tried to scramble free; it tried to take me out to space. And each time I coaxed it back down. Earth's the right place for love, I told it, quoting Rober Frost. I don't know where it's likely to go better. And then I wrote some more. And reader? I didn't die.
What I did was cry. What I did was get on the floor and actually, truly weep. What I did was peel back the anger and the flatness and the story to find the heart beneath it: to let what was beautiful stay beautiful. To grieve it.
What I did, as I lay in child's pose on the piled rug, was think about my friend Russell, who recently told me about a Turkish concept called Huzun. The Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, believes that each city in the world is haunted by its own peculiar sadness. Lisbon is haunted by saudades and Alexandrias by ennui, Glasgow by glumness and Burgos by tristeza. Istanbul is haunted by huzun: a melancholy that comes from not being close enough to God, from the world not being as imminent as you might have wished. Huzun can drive you to the depths of despair, Pamuk says, but avoiding it is what truly costs you. If you want to escape huzun, he says, you must experience it fully. You must go to the depths and come back out. And you must do it collectively, with others, in shared commitment and experience. Huzun is a two-fold beast, Pamuk says, as life-affirming as it is negating. To experience the first you must walk the valley of the second.
Russell describes the feeling in his own words. "It's the vibe-y comfort of deep sadness," he says, and when he says that I feel horror. I have spent my whole life avoiding deep sadness — and now I am supposed to be its familiar? The horror. But Russell embraces it. He loves to drive down childhood streets with the sky pressing down and the world all around him, both present and devastatingly far away. Vibing.
And now I'm trying to learn to do this, too. I tried to avoid death by avoiding life. Now I am trying to let things die so I can live, to accept the anguish and the beauty of endings.
I end my obituary with a story. Years ago, my ex, R, and I went to LA to buy a perfect, baby-blue couch. On the way home, we camped in Joshua Tree National Park. By day, we scrambled on rocks. At night, R brought out their guitar and we sang. That evening, around the fire, I asked for my favorite of favorites. Play Neutral Milk Hotel, I said. Play In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. The night was cold and blue. The campground was empty except for one tent across the road. R began to strum and I began to sing.
What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all 'round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me.
And then we forgot the words. We'd sung the song a million times but now our minds were blank. We sat there, befuddled, the chords still echoing off the rocks. And then, suddenly, a voice from the tent across the road began to sing.
And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
We never saw the person singing, but we ended in a huzunic sort of harmony, a shared wonder in the face of beauty and loss.
How strange, we agreed on the last line. How strange it is to be anything at all.
P.S. If you’ve read this far, congrats — you must be either a masochist or a true fan. I’m here in this post-script because I want to write more things in my life. But to do that, I need money to write. Each Head Snakes piece takes hours to write, and often, I can’t spare the time because I need to work to make rent or pay bills or whatever horrors modern capitalism has me on the hook for. I know there’s a button that asks you to become a paid subscriber. But this is my personal button. If you like my writing, become a supporter! You can pay a small amount monthly or — if you’re a modern Medici — become a founding member. In return, I’m committing publicly to writing weekly or biweekly, more like a clock and less like a clown. Okay, let’s do this.